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Day #108: V/H/S: Viral (2014)

[From IMDB:] Follows fame-obsessed teens who unwittingly become stars of the next internet sensation.

My take:

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the third installment in this franchise is a sad attempt to cash-in on the success of its predecessors, but I’m going to claim justifiable disappointment all the same.

Part of the problem with V/H/S: Viral is that it’s clearly been put together with a core concept in mind – i.e. attempts to produce films that will “go viral” – but fails to follow through with that concept. Sure, some of the scenes do relate to fame-seeking behaviours, but not all of them do – and this immediately sets up one layer of division between the shorts, before anything else is taken into consideration.

Then there’s the important factor of quality, which was an extremely mixed bag across the board. The story about Dante and his cloak was great, and well executed; and the parallel universe segment took an interesting enough turn that it’s slightly more silly aspects were forgivable. In contrast, the short segment of the latin BBQ was completely out of left field (and kinda racist, in my opinion); the skaters segment was both boring and badly executed; and the story that was supposed to wrap all of these disparate segments together was vague and uninspired.

All in all, the negatives of V/H/S: Viral far outweigh the positives – and the lack of an overall cohesiveness means that even the positives fade away once the movie reaches its end.

There’s no real reason that a movie following this format – a collection of shorts wrapped up in an overarching narrative – can’t still be successful. If anything, the prevalence of internet videos should make it even easier, because in one respect or another we’re probably all used to watching videos in this kind of format. So, at least for me, it says a lot about the lack of direction of those who put this film together that it felt like such a mess.